A Second Chance
by DinoDina
Summary: Ianto died months ago. So why is he standing in front of Jack? And why doesn't he know who he is? Fix-it :P oneshot, Janto. Set after the Doctor leaves Jack with Alonso.


Jack nursed a drink. He wasn't sure what it was—he'd returned to the bar after spending the night with Alonso and sending him away—as the drink had appeared in front of him courtesy of another guest.

It had been six months since he'd left Earth. Nothing much had happened: he'd worked on a few ships, been expelled from one for inappropriate conduct, and had taken several lovers to dull the pain of losing Ianto, Stephen, and Alice. None had stayed in his bed for longer than a week.

He didn't want to be with Alonso, who was nice enough, not even as a favor to the Doctor. He'd done nothing for Jack, after all, so why bother? It wasn't his job to save the Earth—to save Ianto—and yet Jack cursed him for it.

Ianto's death had been needless. Stephen's, too. Jack took full responsibility for both.

He pushed the drink away and stood up. The bar swam in front of his eyes: rows and rows of people, another bar behind a pane of glass, Ianto sitting among the crowd in the second room. Jack shook his head. A hallucination. Too much drink, too much grief. He'd too often seen men that looked like Ianto—and didn't look like him at all—and his traitorous heart had jumped at every single one of them.

This man… he sat the way Ianto sat, turned his head the way Ianto turned his head, smiled the way Ianto smiled, and walked the way Ianto walked.

Jack swerved to avoid him as he exited the bar and the man entered it; he was not expecting to feel a hand on his arm.

He turned—it might have been whoever had bought him a drink and was now angry that Jack had rejected the advances—and was met with familiar blue eyes.

"Jack…" not-Ianto said with Ianto's voice. Then his eyes widened. "I didn't…" He shook his head. "How do I know your name?"

"That's a good question." Jack's eyes flickered to the exits before he focused on the man. He looked and sounded too much like Ianto for it to be a coincidence; Jack couldn't meet his eyes even as he threw off his hand. "Who are you?" 

"I…" Not-Ianto furrowed his eyebrows. "I don't know. Why don't I know?"

"You know my name but not yours?"

"Yes."

Jack set his jaw. Was it the similarity to Ianto that made him want to trust the man? UNIT had kept Ianto's body on the precedent that it had been exposed to an alien virus; Jack hadn't even been able to bury him.

"I don't know," he said at last, answering not-Ianto's question. His face fell and he let out a sound of disappointment Jack had heard Ianto let out only later in their relationship, when they were beyond comfortable together. "Look, I don't know who you are—"

"I don't, either."

"But at best, you're a clone. At worst, you're here to lure me into a trap and kill me." At best, it really was Ianto, somehow brought back to life and now searching for him. Jack wasn't about to believe that—or even think it—because if he did, he wouldn't be able to face the truth and defend himself.

"I'm not. I don't think I am." Not-Ianto hesitantly lifted his hand to touch Jack again. "Please help me."

Jack had never been good at resisting Ianto, not when he was looking so lost, so sincere, so trusting. He resisted the urge to stroke not-Ianto's cheek as he snapped out of leniency like it was a dream.

But not-Ianto said "Jack…"

And Jack took his hand.

Jack's room was in the hotel above the bar, ten minutes away at the slow pace he was leading not-Ianto. With every step, it seemed that the man _was_ Ianto: he grew more confident the longer they walked, fitting by Jack's side the way Ianto had, and his hand was warm and _right_ in Jack's.

He lead not-Ianto into the room. It was clean: a new room since Alonso had left, for physical safety as well as from a sense of guilt. Jack set not-Ianto down onto the edge of the bed, where he sat and looked on curiously as Jack dialed the Doctor's number.

After everything that happened, the Doctor owed him more than a one-night stand.

"Doctor?" Not-Ianto asked when Jack put the phone down.

"He can help you."

Jack kept his words short and clip, didn't look at the man because if he did, he would see Ianto. And he _could not_ be seeing Ianto. Best case scenario, this actually _was_ Ianto. Would it still be Ianto without any of his memories? A Ianto who didn't remember liking Star Wars—blushing, admitting to Jack about his childhood crush on Han Solo—and a Ianto who didn't remember their first kiss. Their first date. The months it took them to finally solidify their relationship. If this was Ianto, he wouldn't remember Owen and Tosh. He wouldn't remember how hard it had been to move on from their deaths—how Jack had screwed up when it had been just the three of them, distancing himself from Ianto to feel no pain when it would be Ianto's turn to die.

Well, Ianto _had_ died.

He'd died scared and sad, brittle with grief. And it had all been Jack's fault.

Jack rubbed a hand over his face and turned to face not-Ianto once more, focusing on the wall above his head. "What do you remember?"

"Darkness? Light? Nothing? I… I don't… I don't know!"

"Well, you didn't just appear in the bar, did you?" Not-Ianto looked up abruptly and their eyes met; Jack's eyes widened. "You did?"

"I think I—Jones!" Not-Ianto gasped and shot up. "Ianto Jones!"

Jack's heart skipped a beat.

"That's my name." He moved to smile, stopped, then smiled again, then let the smile fall. "Jack, that's my name." 

Jack felt a strangled sound leave his throat.

His eyes pricked and his chest tightened. _Another_ Ianto Jones? The odds were impossible. But then again—he heard the TARDIS brake down—impossible kind of followed him around.

The Doctor came out the same way they always did, now a woman full of smiles and apologies. Jack's phone had reached the incarnation of the Doctor temporally closest to him: and there she was.

She scanned Ianto Jones and he looked so uncomfortable Jack wanted to hold his hand the way Ianto had done whenever Jack had been dying, or when he'd had a nightmare, or when they'd gone out to London to tell Tosh's family of her death. Jack fisted his hands into his pockets instead, reusing to give into hope.

"You're a Time Lord," Ianto said to the Doctor when she stepped back to look at his biological readings.

"Very good," she said as Jack waited for surprise, anger, or caution; when she turned to Jack, however, the satisfaction and happiness in her voice reflected in her eyes. "It's him."

Fighting the urge to rush to Ianto and hold him as if it would prevent them from being separated again—fighting the doubt asking if it really _was_ Ianto, because memories made a person and this Ianto was almost a blank slate, not at all the man Jack had fallen in love with—Jack took a deep breath, then let out a strangled, relieved, "How?"

"When you closed the Cardiff Rift—oh, six months ago for you?"

Jack nodded.

"Yes, then. The Rift, as you know, is just energy. Temporal, spatial, all of it. Ianto here went into it, but because the House of the Dead wasn't filled with real people—it was all clever projections—"

"Wait." Jack looked between Ianto and the Doctor. "Projections? So it wasn't really him?"

"It _was_. What's a ghost, really? Memories, emotional imprints on the world—energy! So when that Ianto went into the Rift to close it, the Rift had nothing physical to fight against. Ianto bounced around there—for lack of a better word—" the Doctor broke off for a breath and Jack realized he'd been holding his. "And here he is. You're a fixed point in time, the safest place in the whole universe for what was left of the Rift to appear without damaging time and space."

"And Ianto?"

Jack looked at him, sitting there, and Ianto looked up. Their eyes locked. "I know what the Rift is."

"Here's where it gets interesting," the Doctor continued as Jack looked at Ianto with renewed hope. "The Rift latched onto the Ianto energy from the House of the Dead when he went to close it, but instead of them cancelling each other out…" She gestured at Ianto. "You're looking at everything that left of the Rift. Ianto's made up of little more than pure energy manifesting in a familiar form. But it's him, Jack."

"If it's the Rift, how can it be him?" 

"_Ianto energy_, Jack."

"And his memories?"

"Rift travel is traumatic and unpredictable. I'm not surprised he doesn't remember."

"He's sitting right here," Ianto suddenly reminded them.

"Of course you are." The Doctor nodded at him absentmindedly. "Jack?"

"It's him."

The Doctor nodded once more. Jack shot her a look; she needed to leave. She was a new Doctor, one he hadn't met, but the sting of rejection was still sharp, and he felt more hatred than admiration when he met her eyes. She got the message and pursed her lips in an imitation of a smile, no longer energized. Jack didn't feel too bad about it. They'd meet again. Maybe they'd even be able to start over.

Ianto's eyes followed her out the door. He'd always known exactly what to say and when to say it. Even without his memories, it seemed that he'd retained that ability—he wasn't absent, just biding his time. Jack took the time to compose himself, as well.

"I can go." Ianto broke the silence and stood. He met Jack's eyes across the room as his equal, no longer scared and confused, now in possession of answers if not memories. His voice was strong and his body language sure—more than that, it was familiar.

Jack fought against his common sense, which urged him to send Ianto away. He'd already lost Ianto once. Had he even regained Ianto fully? He didn't want to think of how long it would take Ianto to regain his memories—perhaps to fall in love with him all over again—because they didn't have that time.

"It's late." Jack didn't want to think of Ianto, wandering the ship alone at night; he remembered using the same line—not that it was a line at the moment—at the beginning of their relationship to get Ianto to spend the night, when Ianto had been clinging to the last vestiges of their first promise: _just this once_. "Stay. There's only one bed, but I can take the floor."

"No!" A pause, and Jack stared. He hadn't offered to stay separate for Ianto's comfort, but for his own. "I mean… I can't make you do that."

"You don't know me." _I don't know you_. "I'll be out of your hair in the morning."

Jack nodded. He started moving only after Ianto did, moments behind in taking his clothes off and lying down. Jack had never been any good at keeping to his own side of the bed—no matter how he tried—and at his side, Ianto seemed to want the space, hesitant, his mind, hesitant, fighting with his body, which instinctively wanted to be closer to Jack.

"Goodnight, Jack," he whispered like he'd so often done when he'd been alive.

"Goodnight, Ianto," Jack's heart said before he could stop it. Either Ianto was remembering or his manners transcended into this newly alive Rift-based form. Whatever. Come morning, Ianto would be gone. The thought hurt more than Jack expected—he'd already let Ianto back in. That realization hurt less than he wanted it to.

There it was, a second chance. Right next to him, asleep. On his side, hardly any space between them—space that would disappear in the night when Ianto became softer and almost needy, seeking out heat and comfort.

It would be so easy to leave, to stop the heartbreak in its tracks. But Jack closed his eyes and imagined waking up to meet Ianto's eyes; leading him out of the room to breakfast, showing him alien food and customs; showing him the ship he'd bought, teaching him to fly it; waking up next to him again and again, grasping the second chance and never letting Ianto go.

Jack slipped off into sleep, more comfortable and safe than he'd felt in months. The last vestiges of his common sense attempted to stop the natural progression of the night—Jack throwing an arm around Ianto, letting himself be pulled closer and held—but seemed to give up at last. Morning would come and with it, maybe Ianto's memories as well.

And if not, they'd make new ones.


End file.
